Monday, 14 March 2016

A blizzard-blanketed morning, a Red Hook tragedy - and why road safety is part of tackling racism

On January 24, the day after New York City disappeared under a near-record
blanket of snow, I managed to make the mile-long journey to morning worship at
my church, All Saints’ Episcopal in Park Slope. But, when I looked round the
markedly sparser-than-normal congregation, I recognised something unusual.
While around half the faces looking back at me would normally be black or
brown, that morning nearly everyone was white.

Park Slope the day after the blizzard: the streets weren't
the only thing that got whiter.

The change reflected the city’s demographics. The black –
particularly African-Caribbean – families that once lived in Park Slope have
been steadily shifted into outer bits of Brooklyn and Queens,
with poor public transit. They were marooned at home. Far more of the white,
mostly better-off members of the congregation were able to get to worship on
foot or on the functioning bits of the subway.

The sudden shift was a particular regret for me that Sunday
because I was due after the service to give a talk, together with
Transportation Alternatives’ Tom DeVito, on the moral imperatives for making
the city’s streets safer. In preparing for the talk, I’d unearthed a trove of
material about the disproportionate dangers facing black people and other
minorities on streets across the US. Some of the people with the
most urgent stake in what I had to say wouldn’t get to hear it.

Yet much of the commentary I’ve seen on the effects of
racism on black people’s transport choices focuses on the far narrower issue of
black people’s disproportionate chances of being stopped by the police while
driving. It’s an important issue – and one of the many reasons why I’m keen for
the US
to start using more colourblind traffic cameras for roads policing. However, the
focus on that issue – and the squeamishness it sometimes induces about
tightening up enforcement of road rules – often obscures the pervasive effects
of racism on how black people get about, and how safely.

Black people often live in areas with more than their fair
share of traffic deaths - but they are disproportionately unlikely to own their
own vehicle. They suffer more than other groups from the bad consequences of
the US’s
auto culture while gaining fewer than others of its benefits. Making cities’
roads safer – and, in particular, making the streets of black people’s
neighbourhoods safer – is far more than an environmentally-friendly
nice-to-have. It’s an integral part of overcoming centuries of racism in the United States.

Hicks and Lorraine Streets in Red Hook: near my house
in distance, but a world away in experience.

It’s not hard, after all, to discover how racism leads to
road deaths. On the morning of June 2, 2014, only a short distance from where I
live my privileged white existence, Nicholas Soto, a 14-year-old black boy,
crossed the street from the Red Hook Houses, a public housing project, to get
to his school bus. As he crossed – at an intersection that if the law were
properly applied would count as an unmarked crosswalk – the white driver of a
BMW that seems to have been comfortably exceeding the speed limit – sent him flying up into the air, killing him.

The Red Hook Houses are among the many drab housing projects
built around New York
as part of the “slum clearance” programme by Robert Moses, for many decades the
city’s most powerful man. Moses’s decision to place the housing in often
out-of-the way places – the Red Hook Houses are deeply inconvenient for the
subway, particularly because of the barrier formed by Moses’s Brooklyn-QueensExpressway – puts residents at a permanent disadvantage.

The projects were developed, meanwhile, in ways that Jane
Jacobs, the pioneering urbanist, convincingly argues serve to make the spaces
hostile to residents’ needs. The streets outside such projects lack the bustle
they would have had if the houses had opened directly onto them. Drivers
consequently tend to treat the roads – including the one where Nicholas was
killed – as urban freeways, to be navigated far too fast.

The road past the General Grant Houses,
in northern Manhattan, in case you
wondered why more people died on the streets
in such areas.

Yet the residents of such projects – who are overwhelmingly
black or from other minority communities – have little choice but to get about
such streets under their own power or by public transport. In 2006, Alan Berube
of the Brookings Institution and Elizabeth Deakin and Steven Raphael of the
University of California Berkeley published research showing that 19 per cent
of black households in the US had no access to a car, compared with 7.8 per
cent of households as a whole. Even among non-poor black households, 9.9 per
cent had no access to a car, compared with 4 per cent for the US as a whole.
The figures for New York – which has much the
lowest rate of vehicle ownership in the US – must be far higher.

The disparity probably reflects the same reluctance to extend
credit to black people that left so many exposed in the first place to Moses’
mass demolitions of rental properties. The results, meanwhile, are unambiguous. Children and adults from well-off families do, tragically, die in well-off areas such as Park Slope or the Upper West Side. But people like Nicholas Soto are over-represented in the death toll.

Research in 2010 by the
New York Department of Transportation found that people from minority
communities were more likely to be hit while walking or cycling. The effect
reflected street designs in areas such as the Red Hook Houses. There were
higher crash rates in areas with high proportions of black people. But black
people and other minorities were no more likely than other people to suffer
crashes in areas away from their homes.

All of this, of course, should prompt some self-reflection.
For people like me, it’s a reminder that we should not only think about our own
demands for better bike lanes and pedestrian crossings in comfortable, inner
parts of our urban areas - but also about the needs of poorer, farther-flung
parts of the city. If the street outside the Red Hook Houses had been narrowed
by a well-designed bike lane, the BMW driver would almost certainly not have
felt able to drive as fast as he did. Nicholas might still be alive.

8th Street in Park Slope: a safer place, statistically speaking,
for everyone to get about.

Meanwhile, for people who insist that lower speed limits,
loss of parking spaces and restrictions on car use represent the smothering of
a vital form of freedom, it’s worth asking whose freedom is more important. Why
are the critics of change so ready to perpetuate motor cars’ dominance of urban
spaces when it so clearly entrenches the privileges of richer, whiter people at
poorer, browner people’s expense?

But the issue matters to me on a personal level too. When I
arrived at church for worship eight days after the blizzard, I was reminded
what had been missing the previous Sunday. I was greeted again in warm accents
from all around the Caribbean. There was a
sense, which had been dulled the previous week, that I was a member of a
community alongside this diverse group of people, even though I know most of
them only in passing.

Many of the attitudes that make deaths such as Nicholas’s so
common reflect an aversion to treating New York City
– or the US
as a whole – as a true, integrated society. Some of the failures are to do with
failures of road safety policy. New
York’s police department often lapses into thinking
victims cause most crashes. They blamed Nicholas’s death, for example, on his
wearing a hoodie, which they claimed obscured his view. The evidence and common
sense show drivers cause most such crashes.

All Saints' Church: the place that gives me
a wider sense of community

But it’s also common to hear people suggest that residents
of places like the Red Hook Houses could get ahead just as well as anyone if
they put their minds to it. It’s an obvious obscenity to believe that people
who’ve been systematically prevented over centuries from accumulating capital
or getting an education are anywhere close to starting from the same place as privileged people such
as I.

I myself largely ignore the reality of living in a complex,
mixed community. Although I lived close to Nicholas Soto, it’s unlikely I’d
have ever met him had he lived. I find
myself jumping to lazy assumptions about drivers or people I see on the street,
based on ingrained prejudices based on their appearance.

But the Sunday morning after the blizzard and the Sunday following were a reminder that I don’t live entirely in privileged isolation.
I smile at, chat with and take communion alongside people whom current policy
leaves unjustly exposed to unjustifiable extra risk of traffic death. It’s just
as much – if not more - my moral obligation to seek better road conditions for
them as it is to seek them for myself.

Thank you for an excellent piece of writing on the systematic racism that is built right into the fabric of the city. It is fascinating reading Robert Moses's defence of his actions. He basically states that the end justifies the means. See, for example, his statement at:

http://www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com/detritus/moses/response.htm

For example, from page 4 of the above link, here is his defence of destroying neighborhoods and displacing the people who lived there:

"Ninety-eight percent of the ghetto folks we moved were given immeasurably better living places at unprecedented cost."

Reading the actual words of Robert Moses gives a clear and insightful look into the attitudes that built so much of our transportation infrastructure.

Thank you. On top of Moses' words, it's worth bearing in mind that huge numbers of his public pronouncements on these issues were simply lies. The "ghetto" people often weren't rehoused, according to The Power Broker, but left to fend for themselves, moving into overcrowded accommodation.

On top of that, the public housing that Moses built is miserable on multiple levels. He didn't provide lids for lavatories, for example, believing it was an unwarranted luxury to offer the poor.

Thanks for your comment. You're absolutely correct that huge numbers of people seem to think the white experience is the only valid one. A lot of people seem entirely to miss society's embedded racism. Not, of course, that I do much to correct things beyond writing things like this.

About Me

I'm a hefty, 6ft 5in Scot. I moved back to London in 2016 after four years of living and cycling in New York City. Despite my size, I have a nearly infallible method of making myself invisible. I put on an eye-catching helmet, pull on a high visibility jacket, reflective wristbands and trouser straps, get on a light blue touring bicycle and head off down the road. I'm suddenly so hard to see that two drivers have knocked me off because, they said, they didn't see me.
This blog is an effort to explain to some of the impatient motorists stuck behind me, puzzled friends and colleagues and - perhaps most of all myself - why being a cyclist has become almost as important a part of my identity as far more important things - my role as a husband, father, Christian and journalist. It seeks to do so by applying the principles of moral philosophy - which I studied for a year at university - and other intellectual disciplines to how I behave on my bike and how everyone uses roads.